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Monday, December 12, 2011

Every now and then I like to conduct social experiments and test the limitations of people around me my own personality. For example, have you ever been sitting across from someone you cared about, drinking a refreshing beverage, and thought to yourself, "What if I just threw this glass of ice cold water in their lap while they were on the toilet?"

I totally do it.

Just ask my husband.

This is an unfortunate characteristic of mine, which more often than not leads to...frustrating outcomes. However, I just can't help but occasionally indulge in these experimental whims.

Which brings me to today, when I decided that I should try World of Warcraft.

I consider myself to be a geek. I love technology, social media, and web development. I am a .NET programmer and have been known to get giddy over a particularly complex SQL Procedure executing without error.

However, I also love 5 inch heels, Bravolebrities, and human contact.

I am a Geek Hybrid.

So, today, as I sat drinking a refreshing beverage, I thought, "Instead of relentlessly mocking people who play World of Warcraft, why don't I try it and see what it's all about."

Here's what I thought I knew about World of Warcraft:

1. It's a game where magic people walk around a lot and occasionally hit each other with things like swords and rocks.
2. It's part of the "role playing" world, where people have cards and make up stories and get mad at each other when their story doesn't jibe with another story. Or something.
3. People who play it rarely talk about it in a way that makes it accessible to people who don't play it.

After consulting with my little squirrels in the Treehouse, I discover that this game is actually FREE and doesn't require a game cartridge (i don't know. is that what they're called now?) or a controller.

What? I can play it online for free?

Sold.

At this point, I Google World of Warcraft (yes, shut up, I had to Google it), and my little squirrels begin chattering away in the background about what sort of "race" I should be and about "alliances" and turning into animals and such. I feel that they are ruining some of the magic of me observing this phenomenon in it's natural habitat. I mean, how long would Dian Fossey have put up with having two gorilla experts clucking behind her about how awesome their gorillas are and what happened when their gorilla wandered into alliance territory?

Not very long.

But I forge ahead.

The website is a little overwhelmingly dorktastic. I mean there's volcanos and dragons and a dark palette with one too many lens flares and even what I'm assuming (but am I sure I will be corrected on) is a troll dressed as Santa Clause. So I carefully scan for the words "play" and "free" and what do you know? An obnoxiously beveled "Play It Free" button.

Of course, now I have to fill out a registration form, but I am just sure I am going to be dressing up my sexy elf avatar at any second.

"What the hell? I have to download something?"

"Yes, you have to download it."

"Well crap."

Disappointed at the lack of streaming game play, I begin downloading this console. Durant (my laptop, named after the notable caveman dieter, because this machine is just as pretentious, annoying, and useless) immediately calls bullshit.

So I have to download it again.

My patience is growing thin with World of Warcraft, and I haven't even started playing it yet. After watching this dragon look at me grudgingly for ten minutes from the top of Mordor, I finally get my "Welcome to the Role Players in the Mist World of Warcraft" screen. Glory! Sexy elf fantasies on deck!

What? The "Play" button is grayed out, because it has MORE setting up to do???

Well, hell.

As I wait for Durant to learn Trollish, have a love child with L. Ron Hubbard, and then teach it ride a panther lion across the open plains of Azeroth, I decide it might be prudent to read up on what exactly I'll be doing when and if I am ever allowed into WOW.

After reading parts of three sentences of the Beginner's Guide, I took a quick break to have the bleeding in my brain stopped, and when I returned from complex neurosurgery followed by a lengthy and painful recovery period, WOW was just about finished installing.

Alas, I have already been injured in World of Warcraft and am in need of repair. This repair process does give me the time to pick what seems to be the perfect race for my kind.

Anything that involves going to Microsoft to download something in order to fix it has only a slightly higher chance of working than me becoming the Queen of the Forsaken on World of Warcraft.

And indeed....

It didn't.

So here's what.

I don't think World of Warcraft is a real thing.

I think that what we (as non WOW "players") believe is World of Warcraft is a massive conspiracy by people who are, pardon the pun, more "crafty" than we are. While we as adolescents were desperately trying to fit into and establish a social group that we perceived to be superior to other social groups, WOW "players" actually accepted that a better survival tactic would be to band together and isolate from said social groups so that those social group members could be studied, exploited, and, if necessary, destroyed.

In other words, while I was misspelling "Wheezer" in white out on my Five Star binder and then getting duly humiliated by my peers, the little squirrels were in friends' basements playing out hundreds if not thousands of warfare scenarios. These "races", "alliances", and "professions" are nothing more than a high level code for what are very real and very terrifying tactical stratagems. For what purpose? To what end?

What else?

The Zombie Apocolypse.

Dorks have been pooling their resources, categorizing their skills, and planning an elaborate Useless Peer Zombie Bait Trade (UPZBT) since 1994. Blizzard Entertainment is just another "Umbrella Corporation" named for the most likely catalyst for the inevitable zombie apocalypse: global warming.

All my futile attempt to "play" this "game" today proves is that trapping zombie bait and tricking us into registering ourselves into UPZBT is far easier than any of us would probably care to admit. I am perfectly aware that I have no usable skills in a survival scenario, except *maybe* distance running. But if Walking Dead has anything to say about it that won't matter, because apparently zombies can eventually learn to sprint.

So while I might have uninstalled this completely unusable pacifying sedation device from my computer, it won't erase my now permanent membership into a bait trade for the undead.